Of course, this is to rush ahead as we have left the mainline railways with just the termini at Euston and Paddington, London Bridge, still to emerge in its final form, and Fenchurch Street. Of course, the London & Blackwall Railway at Fenchurch Street could hardly be regarded as ‘mainline’, and nor at this early stage could London Bridge. The idea of a central terminus for all of the mainline railways as they reached London had been considered and rejected by the House of Lords, while Parliament had passed a series of acts that gradually brought a measure of control to the railways, not simply helping to monitor and improve safety, but also enabling those of modest means to travel from one end of the country to the other on any day of the week, albeit not by any train and not in any measure of comfort.
The question of a central terminus for the whole of the capital was not handled by members directly, for Parliament did what it still does today when handed something which is too hot to handle, or which members know little about or, most likely in this case, in which they themselves have a vested interest: they set up a Royal Commission, known as the Royal Commission on Railway Termini within or in the immediate vicinity of the Metropolis, in 1846.
What had happened was that the country was in the midst of one of those periodic railway booms that so affected not only the development of the railways, but the judgement of too many of those involved. This extended to members of both Houses of Parliament many of whom had also invested heavily in the railways, and even if they hadn’t, their friends and families had done so. The largest and most ambitious of the railways planned were those that wished to link the most populous and fastest growing regions with the capital. The West and the Midlands already enjoyed this benefit; others did not want to be left behind. The railway entrepreneurs thought in grand terms, always aiming high, so many of the new lines saw themselves reaching into the heart of the City and the West End. There was also the proposal that there should be a grand central terminus on what is now the Victoria Embankment, which in itself seemed not unreasonable except that it was to be connected by lines linking it with Paddington and Fenchurch Street, running right through both Westminster and the City. This made even the reconstruction after the Great Fire of London seem modest, and the government of the day was terrified at the disruption and inconvenience that would be caused. There would, of course, have had to be lines later connecting with Waterloo and London Bridge, requiring at least one more major bridge over the River Thames, and the connections to the London & North Western, as the London & Birmingham had become, and King’s Cross, as well as the later arrival of St Pancras, and Liverpool Street, hardly bears thinking about. Each of these would have required at least four running lines, perhaps six for Waterloo, and even if King’s Cross and St Pancras shared a route, it would needed widening as hardly any of the termini remained at the size at which they were first built.
London’s mainline termini
We have seen the arrival of the Great Western at Paddington and the London & Birmingham at Euston, but these were only the first of several mainline railways to reach the capital. London was not only a prestigious objective, it was a major traffic generator, and so much so that the Midland Railway and the Great Central made strenuous efforts to reach the capital. It was not just that the alternative of using the lines of other companies was expensive and unsatisfactory, the growth of the railways once built meant that, on the most promising and strategically important lines, the London termini and their approaches were under pressure within a few years of opening.
The first of the next wave of termini to be opened was that at Waterloo, four years after the Royal Commission on London’s termini, yet the station suffered from being remote from the destinations of most of the travellers arriving off its trains. On the other hand, despite its location, it was a reminder of the disruption that extending a main line railway closer to the centre of London could bring. It was designed to replace an earlier and even less satisfactory terminus at Nine Elms. Once again, we find a station that was to grow piecemeal, with four separate stages of construction. Unusually, however, Waterloo was extended to provide through running, with the creation of a station just outside, to the east, at Waterloo Junction, on the line from London Bridge to Charing Cross, so it was also used by two railway companies. Waterloo could have been a mess, something akin to the shambles that was Euston Station before its major reconstruction in the late 1960s, but it was completely rebuilt by the London & South Western Railway’s last general manager, the vigorous and relatively young, Herbert Walker, between 1910 and 1920, becoming a dignified and cohesive whole, and the first British terminus designed for electric trains.
OLD WATERLOO
The old Waterloo Station, with its through lines to the South Eastern, was chaotic, and matters were not helped by the narrow wooden bridge that crossed the through lines and was the cause of many a missed train. Punch carried a cartoon of a Dorsetshire farmer and his wife struggling through the crowds on the bridge and saying: ‘Mary, no wonder the French lost here!’
The surrounding area, as with so many of the London termini, became crowded with cheap hotels and many disreputable establishments, so that the station was sometimes referred to as ‘Whoreterloo’.
The predecessor of Waterloo, Nine Elms, was chosen as the terminus for the new London & Southampton Railway, first mooted in 1831, largely because it meant that costly disturbance to business and residential property would be minimal. Its position, close to the southern end of Vauxhall Bridge, mean that passengers could make their way to the West End, while boat services were envisaged for those travelling to the City. It opened on 21 May 1838, when the London & Southampton had reached Woking. The following year, the London & Southampton unveiled its ambitions with a new name, the London & South Western Railway, although it did not reach its original objective until 11 May 1840. The first train, carrying guests, took three hours for the journey of just under eighty miles between Nine Elms and Southampton.
Despite its ambitious title, the LSWR soon found that its heaviest traffic was between what would now be the outer suburbs and London. Many of the station names of the early LSWR differ from those of today, with the original Kingston now being Surbiton. The first branch line was opened on 27 July 1846 from Clapham Junction to Richmond, and soon provided a quarter of the company’s traffic. Yet the remote location of Nine Elms meant that road coaches had survived between Chertsey and the City. The original promoters of the branch to Richmond had also proposed a line from Nine Elms to a supposed ‘West End’ terminus near Hungerford Bridge. Having taken over the Richmond branch before its completion, the LSWR obtained powers in 1845 for a new terminus in York Road, close to the southern end of Waterloo Bridge; and a further act in 1847 increased the number of lines to the new terminus to four and also the size of the site. This meant disruption on a grand scale, with the extension to Waterloo, then requiring far fewer tracks than exist today, required the demolition of 700 houses and the crossing of twenty-one roads, despite the 1¾ mile railway using viaduct with more than 200 arches for most of its length. Obstacles that affected the alignment included Lambeth Palace, Vauxhall Gardens and a gas works. An intermediate station was built at Vauxhall, while a bridge over Westminster Road had to be built on the skew with the then unprecedented span of 90ft. The LSWR was encouraged to think on such a grand scale because of the possibility of sharing the new terminus with the London Brighton & South Coast Railway, but this came to nothing, fortunately, as Waterloo soon proved to be too small for even the LSWR’s needs.
Strangely, despite its inconvenient location, Robert Stephenson told the Royal Commission that there was ‘no point on the South side of the Thames so good for a large railway station, as the south end of Waterloo Bridge’.
The original Waterloo Station opened on 11 July 1848, after Nine Elms closed the previous day, although remaining for VIP use, including visiting royalty and, much later, the departure of the British Army’s horses to the Boer War. With some foresight, Waterloo was designed as a through station and under a two-span 280ft iron and glass roof were six tracks and six 300 ft platform faces, although the length of these was soon doubled, while a spur towards the river suggested that the LSWR was attempting to keep every option open. The catchment area for the new terminus continued to grow, with an extension of the Richmond branch to Windsor on 1 December 1849, by which time an additional up line had been installed.
The LSWR was not content with Waterloo, but wanted to get closer to the City. Already, there was no room for goods traffic, and this was important for many of the London termini in the early years before the demands of passenger traffic moved all but parcels and newspaper traffic down the line to a specially-built goods depots.
Another indication of the pressure that London’s growth was placing on some of the more essential services was the lack of cemetery space for the enlarged population. A solution came in 1854 when the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company opened a private cemetery at Brookwood, conveniently on the LSWR mainline west of Woking, and a private necropolis station was built at Waterloo for the special trains with their hearse carriages.
Expansion continued at Waterloo as the LSWR network grew. Four additional platform faces were built in 1860, in what was to become known as the Windsor Station, and separated from the original station, now known as the ‘Main Station’ by its own cab road. The opening of the South Eastern’s Charing Cross extension in 1864 was accompanied by a short spur into Waterloo, and this could have enabled passenger trains to work through to London Bridge and, later, to Cannon Street, thus providing the long sought after City extension of the LSWR, but instead it was rarely used by passenger trains. As traffic developed, this was just as well as there would have been many conflicting movements at Waterloo Junction. Through traffic was discouraged by passengers interchanging between the two companies having to rebook, and only later were through fares offered for those attempting to reach the City.
Yet another Waterloo station was added in 1878, opening on 16 December, but on this occasion, new offices were opened and a refreshment room, with a cab yard under a new 300ft frontage on Waterloo Road. In 1885, a further final extension was added, with the North station built as an extension of the Windsor Station and opened in November, with six new platform faces, so that by now Waterloo had a total of eighteen; and unusually for the day, all of them suitable for arrivals and departures, but still served by just four approach tracks, which were the cause of much delay as by this time Waterloo was handling 700 trains daily. The original Waterloo was an open station, with tickets being checked at Vauxhall, and this no doubt added to the delays. The station itself was a mess, not least because of an eccentric platform numbering system that meant that many platforms used the same number for two faces, and this, with a paucity of departure information, meant that even if the intending passenger found the right platform, there was a 50 per cent risk of boarding the wrong train.
Between 1886 and 1892, a further two approach tracks were added and, once again, there was massive destruction of housing, so that the LSWR had to provide new property in 1890 for more than a thousand people.
Passengers for the City were growing in numbers, and were also people of considerable influence. The LSWR itself calculated that of the 50,000 daily arrivals at Waterloo, a quarter of them were heading for the City, divided equally between the buses and the SER. As early as 1882, plans were considered for an overhead railway, but rejected as too costly, and no doubt hazardous given the technology of the day, and these were revived in 1891, but still considered too costly.
Relief was eventually found in the Waterloo and City tube line, authorised in 1893. The LSWR provided much of the capital and five of the eight directors, and agreed to operate the line for 55 per cent of the gross receipts after payment of a 3 per cent dividend. The line opened in 1898, providing a direct non-stop link between a station not strictly deep underground but in Waterloo’s basement and a point just across the road from the Bank of England, appropriately enough known as Bank. Open air carriage sidings were constructed at the Waterloo end, and rolling stock could be moved using a hoist. In 1907, the company took over the line completely.
Next came Victoria, the main station for the London Brighton & South Coast Railway, which had acquired the London & Croydon and also used that company’s terminus at London Bridge. Victoria and London Bridge were far enough apart to serve different markets, with Victoria being close to, but not actually part of, the West End, while London Bridge was across the river from the City.
The truth was that no one terminus could ever have been sufficient for London, even if the Royal Commission had decided differently. The City would have needed its own station, so that perhaps London Bridge, Broad Street, Cannon Street, Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street would have been merged into one large city terminus located somewhere in the ‘Square Mile’–but where?
As it was, the London Brighton & South Coast Railway was unhappy with its shared terminus with the South Eastern Railway at London Bridge, with friction breaking out between the two companies from time to time. The location was not that convenient for the City, and far too remote for the West End. A new company was established, the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway, claiming that it would be building a terminus not only for the LBSCR, but also for the South Eastern, the East Kent Railway (the predecessor of the London, Chatham & Dover) and the London & South Western. Despite its poverty, the LCDR realised that the new arrangement still left it at the mercy of other companies, and in 1860 obtained the necessary powers to build its own new routes to both the West End and the City of London, with the former achieved through a new line from Beckenham to Battersea.
Such were the changing fortunes and ambitions of the railway companies, that the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway found itself building a major terminus for the LBSCR and the LCDR plus the Great Western, which meant that the line from Longhedge Junction, Battersea, where the GWR would approach over the West London Extension Railway, had to be of mixed gauge to accommodate the broad gauge GWR trains. The LBSCR provided two-thirds of the Victoria Station and Pimlico‘s capital and secured its own terminus and access lines, taking 8½ acres of the 14 acre site, so that despite the magnificent façade of the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria was really to be two stations in one!
The London & Brighton approach to Victoria from Clapham Junction required both a tight curve and a steep climb, with the bridge over the river built high enough to allow passage of the largest ships likely to use the Thames, which meant that it was unrealistically high as already larger ships were being handled at new docks downriver. This approach had to be shared with the GWR despite that company’s connection with the LCDR. On crossing the bridge, the line then had a steep descent to the station as it had been decided that an approach on a viaduct to an elevated station would have been unacceptable to the wealthy landowners in the area. Other concessions to this element included extending the train shed beyond the platforms and the early sleepers, of longitudinal design, were also mounted on rubber to minimise vibration.
The new station opened for LBSCR trains on 1 October 1860, built on a generous scale, being 800ft long and 230ft wide, with a ridge and furrow roof having 50ft spans covering ten tracks and six platform faces. There was a cab road from Eccleston Bridge with an exit into Terminus Place. The Grosvenor Hotel was constructed independently despite its obvious attachment to the terminus as the presence of several railway companies convinced the promoters of its success, and was completed in 1861, but the original hotel was along the west side of the stations and could not conceal the distinctly unattractive, even primitive, start to the station, with offices in a series of wooden huts, for while the LCDR was indeed poverty stricken, even the more affluent LBSCR had found the cost of the move into the centre of London expensive. Matters were not improved when, during February 1884, the Fenian Brotherhood deposited a bomb in a bag in the left luggage office, which also wrecked the LBSCR’s cloakroom and ticket office, although fortunately the police were able to prevent similar outrages at Charing Cross and Paddington.
The joint LCDR and GWR station was not completed until 25 August 1862, although the LCDR had made use of a temporary station since December 1860. The LCDR made use of a modest side entrance into the station, which had nine tracks on its smaller acreage, with four of them mixed gauge. The GWR started services to and from Victoria on 1 April 1863, with what was essentially a suburban feeder service from Southall where connections could be made with its main line services. Trains running through to Reading, Slough, Uxbridge and Windsor were also provided at times over the years that followed, and finally, between 1910 and 1912, a daily train in each direction between Birmingham and Wolverhampton and Victoria. Wartime restrictions saw the end of the Southall service in 1915, and in any case, such a service was really superfluous after the opening of the Circle Line in 1884.
Several other railway companies operated into Victoria, including the Great Northern Railway, operating from Barnet via Ludgate Hill from 1 March 1868, and the Midland Railway from South Tottenham and Hendon via Ludgate Hill from 1 July 1875, both of which used the LCDR station. Even London & North Western trains operated from Broad Street via Willesden Junction and the West London Railway from 1 January 1869 into the LBSC station; and survived the longest as an occasional service was still operated between Willesden Junction and Victoria until 1917.
Another new station at Grosvenor Road was too close to Victoria to be of much commercial value, but was used by the LBSCR for up trains to stop for ticket inspection.
By 1890, with all of its lines completed, the LBSCR was producing a steady return on its capital, with the annual dividend running at 6 or 7 per cent. It was time to give Victoria a complete overhaul. Starting in 1892, the LBSCR acquired the houses on the west side of the station and also bought the freehold of the Grosvenor Hotel when the owners refused to sell houses owned by them. The LBSCR let the hotel to a new operator and built an impressive 150-room wing across the front of the station. The initial development of the station during the 1890s produced another 90 ft in width, but only at the southern end of the station between Eccleston Bridge and the hotel. Even this was judged, rightly, to be insufficient. Unable to expand further west due to Buckingham Palace Road, or east because of the LCDR station, the only solution was to extend the station towards the river, and for this the powers were obtained in 1899, so that the station could increase from ten roads and eight platform faces to thirteen roads with nine faces, several of which could be used by two trains at once. Work started in 1901.
Clinging to the north bank
The next two termini arrived at much the same time, with the South Eastern Railway opening what was the West End of London’s only terminus at Charing Cross in 1864, followed by the London Chatham & Dover Railway opening its first station at Blackfriars, but on the south side of the river, later that year. These stations were to show the full impact of Parliament’s rulings.
Despite its cramped location, no London mainline station is as well situated for the traveller as Charing Cross, at the end of The Strand. The substantial forecourt and the impressive façade of the Charing Cross Hotel combine to disguise the fact that the station is smaller than many in medium-sized provincial cities.
A railway terminus was first planned in 1846, when the South Eastern Railway promoted a bill for an extension from Bricklayer’s Arms to Hungerford Bridge, but it was unsuccessful. After the SER managed to obtain the approval of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway for a line from London Bridge to the West End, in 1857 the SER settled on the Hungerford Market as the ideal site, with the prospect of a link to the LSWR at Waterloo.
The Charing Cross Railway Company Act 1859 authorised the construction of a line one mile and sixty-eight chains in length, mainly on viaduct except for Hungerford Bridge which took it across the Thames and into the terminus. Once again the CCRC was separate from the SER in theory, but clearly linked to it, with the SER providing £300,000 of the initial £800,000 capital, and later raising this investment to £650,000 as land purchase costs proved to be far heavier than anticipated. Much of the money was spent south of the river, with the governors of St Thomas Hospital exacting the heavy price of £296,000, and then, despite the poverty of the area at the time, the many slum landlords also managed to follow this example. In addition, the SER itself had to pay for the reconstruction of Borough Market as well as a 404ft iron viaduct over it, all the time while taking care to avoid Southwark Cathedral. It was not just the living who had to be accommodated, as the SER had to oversee the removal of more than 7,000 corpses from the College Burial Ground of St Mary, Lambeth, and their removal and re-interment at Brookwood. Later, in June 1878, a new junction was opened to provide a link, Metropolitan Junction, with the LCDR line to Blackfriars.
The new line required the removal and scrapping of Brunel’s original Hungerford Bridge, but nothing was wasted as the bridge and iron work was used for the construction of Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol. As at Cannon Street, the bridge included a pedestrian walkway, in this case on the eastern side, for which a toll of a ½ d (0.2p) was charged until 1878, when the Metropolitan Board of Works paid the SER £98,000 for pedestrians to enjoy free access.
Charing Cross opened on 11 January 1864, initially with just a limited service of trains to Greenwich and Mid Kent, but on 1 April, trains from the north of the county started to use the new station, and on 1 May, main line services followed.
The six platforms were all built in wood, ranged in length up to 690 feet and extended on to the bridge. The Charing Cross Hotel was designed by the architect EM Barry, with 250 bedrooms and almost wrapped itself around the station by extending down Villiers Street, and later had an annex across the street reached by a covered footbridge.
Powers were obtained in 1864 in the North Western & Charing Cross Railway Act, to provide an underground line running just below the surface for goods and passenger trains from Charing Cross to Euston. The LNWR and SER both gave guarantees to raise 5 per cent of the capital, but this was not enough to encourage investors and the scheme was abandoned in the financial crisis of 1866 that pushed the LCDR into Chancery. The Euston link surfaced again in 1885, with the two railway companies prepared to provide a third of the capital each, but floundered again. Had either line been built, they could have undermined financial backing for the Hampstead tube, but on the other hand, could also have provided the basis for a modern day regional express across the centre of London.
The SER started buying the freehold of property on either side of the station in readiness for much needed expansion. In 1900, powers were obtained to widen Hungerford Bridge on the east side and also to enlarge the terminus. Having got this far, the SER was then discouraged from any further move by the plans to replace the station and bridge with a road bridge.
Meanwhile, Blackfriars opened on 1 June 1864, on the south bank of the River Thames, at the junction of today’s Southwark Street and the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. It served as a terminus for just a little over six months until the railway bridge over the Thames was completed, allowing trains to stop at a temporary station at Little Earl Street on the north bank from 21 December 1864. A station on the north bank, Ludgate Hill, opened on 1 June 1865, it too becoming a terminus until the Metropolitan Extension was completed to Farringdon Street on 1 January 1866. The LCDR had persuaded both the Great Northern and London & South Western Railways to subscribe more than £300,000 apiece towards the cost of the extension with the promise of through running powers, which they soon exercised, along with the Midland Railway, which started running trains through to Victoria in 1875. The LCDR itself sent trains from Herne Hill through to King’s Cross and then as far as Barnet.
From its opening in 1886, until 1937, the station now known as Blackfriars was known as St Paul’s.
The construction of Blackfriars, or St Paul’s, was brought about by the success of the London, Chatham & Dover’s extension towards London. The LCDR had been allowed to extend to London by its Metropolitan Extension Act of 1860, which gave it powers to reach Victoria and, more ambitious still, to a junction with the Metropolitan Railway at Farringdon Street, offering considerable long-term potential that was not to be realised for many years. The new station at Ludgate Hill and the extension through the City was a considerable success. Unfortunately, a shortage of space meant that Ludgate Hill offered just two island platforms, which soon proved insufficient for the traffic on offer and, as expansion was out of the question given the high cost of property and the LCDR’s over-stretched finances, an additional station was built on a spur off the Metropolitan Extension, and it was this that was named St Paul’s when it opened on 10 May 1886, despite the fact that the name Blackfriars was already in use as the name of the adjacent District and Circle Line station. It was a necessity forced on the railway and was built as cheaply as possible, even having a wooden booking office. It was as mean a structure as has ever been devised for a terminus in a capital city as the cramped surroundings and the presence of the Metropolitan District Railway immediately under the station meant that there was no forecourt and no cab access to the tar-coated wooden platforms, which were reached by a dark and drab staircase. Only two of the platforms were given numbers, simply 1 and 2, between the eastern siding and the up and down loops. Yet, in incised letters on the stones surrounding the doors, the names were given of fifty-four destinations that could be reached from the station, including St Petersburg and Vienna, with nothing to suggest that the intrepid traveller could expect to make several changes along the way.
Trains running to Holborn Viaduct generally stopped at Blackfriars, while it also took the City portions of trains from the new Gravesend branch, opened on the same day as the new terminus, and which were later joined by those from the Greenwich Park branch, opened in October 1888. The new station was the only one operated by the LCDR with direct access to the underground network. Ludgate Hill continued to prove inadequate for the traffic on offer and became the butt of much press criticism as it was the most convenient station for Fleet Street, then the home of almost all the national newspapers and of the London offices of many provincial dailies.
The other station in this unhappy trio, Holborn Viaduct, was generally regarded as being useless, largely because it was inconveniently sited. Despite these criticisms, it was not until well after the formation of the South Eastern & Chatham that any attempt was made to remedy the situation, with a minor reconstruction of Ludgate Hill between 1907 and 1912. The irony of the situation was that Holborn Viaduct had been built by the LCDR to relieve the pressure on Ludgate Hill, using the £100,000 (around £5 million today) paid by the Post Office for its telegraph system when the telegraph systems were nationalised to provide a cohesive nationwide telegraph system.
In the meantime, for those travelling to London from the south, a terminus in the City at Cannon Street was opened in 1866 for the South Eastern Railway, which had previously decanted its passengers at London Bridge, on the wrong side of the Thames. Earlier plans had been to provide two other stations on the extension line running to Charing Cross, but when the London, Chatham & Dover Railway was authorised to provide an extension to Ludgate Hill, the SER realised that it also needed a terminus on the north bank of the River Thames. It was even felt that there could be local traffic between Cannon Street and Charing Cross from those anxious to avoid the heavy congestion on the streets of London.
This was to prove to be no flight of fancy. From the time it first opened, on 1 September 1866, Cannon Street fulfilled its promise of being served by all trains proceeding to and from Charing Cross, including boat trains, and with these and a shuttle service between the two stations, there was a five minute frequency service between the West End and the City, taking seven minutes, and costing 6d first class, 4d second class and 2d third class, compared with 3d for the horse bus. The local traffic was considerable, with 3.5 million of the 8 million passengers using Cannon Street in 1867 travelling solely between the City and the West End. This continued until the opening of the District Railway between Westminster and Blackfriars in May 1870, and which reached Mansion House in July 1871, while the completion of the Circle Line, on 6 October 1884, saw a station opened under the forecourt of Cannon Street.
One kind of specialised traffic had already disappeared before this. The seven minute run had proved a great draw to certain ladies who found that it combined with the comfort of a first-class compartment to provide the ideal environment for the entertainment of their clients. Once a stop was introduced at Waterloo, from 1 January 1869, the number of drawn blinds on trains running into and out of Charing Cross dropped dramatically!
The extension to Cannon Street had been authorised by an Act of 1861, with a bridge across the Thames and a triangular junction on viaducts with the line between London Bridge and Charing Cross. At first, and for many years, all trains running to and from Charing Cross called at Cannon Street. There were five tracks, four running roads and an engine road, on the bridge, which had pedestrian walkways on either side, with the one on the east reserved for railway personnel, while that on the west was available to the public on payment of a ½d toll. The station itself abutted immediately onto the bridge, with nine roads, and was a handsome building offering stunning views over the Thames, and with a hotel fronting the street. The roof was a single span of 190ft over 100ft above the rails and glazed over two-thirds of its surface, surmounted by a 22ft-wide lantern running almost the whole 680ft length. The two longest platforms extended beyond the roof and on to the bridge, giving commanding views of the river.
The hotel, the City Terminus, was operated by an independent company and opened in May 1867, but was later acquired by the SER, and later renamed The Cannon Street Hotel. It managed, for reasons that remain obscure and can be nothing more than a coincidence, to become the venue for the creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in July 1920. Cannon Street remained the exclusive preserve of the SER, except during late 1867 and until the end of July, 1868, when the London Brighton & South Coast Railway operated two up morning and two down evening trains to and from Brighton.
Across the City, at Broad Street, another terminus was in hand. In 1863, at the height of a renewed, and very short-lived, railway boom, the House of Lords Select Committee on Metropolitan Railway Communications looked once again at the concept of a large central terminus for all of the railways. Once again the outcome was a report against it. The Committee concluded that any new lines within the central area would have to be underground, with the limits placed by the original Royal Commission of 1846 being extended still further out. The concept of an ‘inner circle’ north of the Thames to link the termini was first mooted, and this was endorsed by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Railway Schemes (Metropolis). Thus, the basis of the Circle Line were laid and assured of political support. It might have been even better if the line had managed to touch Euston rather than simply dump passengers with heavy luggage nearby, and also stray south of the Thames to include Waterloo, whose passengers at the time were the most inconvenienced, stuck south of the River Thames.
There was a major accident at Charing Cross shortly after the turn of the century. During the afternoon of 5 December 1905, workmen were busy on a programme of roof maintenance work. At 15.45, there was a sudden noise; passengers and railwaymen looking up saw the workmen rushing to safety, and fortunately followed their example. Shortly afterwards, at 15.57, there was a deafening roar as 70ft of the roof at the outer end of the station collapsed into the station, while pushing outwards the western wall onto the Avenue Theatre in Craven Street. Inside the station, three men were killed, as rubble, iron work and glass crashed on to the 15.50 express to Hastings, while at the Avenue Theatre, three men out of a hundred who, by unhappy coincidence, were also working on renovations to that building, were crushed under the rubble.
The SECR closed Charing Cross at once, and traffic on Hungerford Bridge was stopped, and then the trains set back, one at a time, to Waterloo Junction.
Investigation soon showed that a weakness in a wrought-iron tie rod next to the windscreen at the southern end of the roof was the main cause. The weakness was due to a fault that doubtless had occurred at the time of manufacture, and had grown worse over the years as it expanded and contracted as weather conditions changed. Despite claims by engineers that the remaining roof would be safe for another forty years, the SECR decided to take no chances, rebuilding the roof and walls at a reduced height and dispensing with the single span. Meanwhile, trains were diverted to Cannon Street and Charing Cross could not re-open to traffic until 19 March 1906. The closure did have one benefit, allowing the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, precursor of today’s Northern Line, to dig down through the forecourt, something which the SECR had prohibited for fear of causing difficulty and inconvenience to their passengers, and press ahead with building The Strand underground station.
Reaching into the City
Travellers from the south were not the only substantial group of city workers, with many coming from the eastern counties, and indeed from around the north of London. The one terminus that was built largely for a suburban clientele was Broad Street, built as the City terminus for the North London Railway, which opened in 1850 as the East & West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway, which was largely controlled by the London & North Western Railway. The name of the original company showed that goods traffic was the aim, but by the time the simpler title of the North London Railway was adopted in 1853, it was clear that passenger traffic was of growing importance. At first the NLR used Fenchurch Street on the London & Blackwall Railway, but this involved a four-mile detour around East London.
The LNWR agreed to meet most of the cost as it needed a goods station in the City, which at the time required large quantities of coal for office heating. The small NLR would not have been able to afford a terminus on its own, no matter what the prospects for passenger traffic. Already, parliamentary approval could not be taken for granted, especially as the extension required demolition of many homes. To overcome this hurdle, the NLR promised to provide workmen’s trains from Dalston for a return fare of just one penny. Three tracks connected the station with the rest of the NLR network. The platforms were approached by an external staircase on the eastern side of the station frontage, itself showing a mixture of styles and there is no record of an architect.
The relationship between the NLR and LNWR was not so close that they could operate as a single entity, and so Broad Street operated as a joint station with two booking halls. At platform level, there were two train sheds, initially having just four tracks between them. Opened on 1 November 1865, the initial service was a train every fifteen minutes to Bow, and another to Chalk Farm, as well as a service every half-hour to Kew via Hampstead Heath. In 1866, a service to Watford was introduced and in 1879, some Chalk Farm workings were extended to Willesden, but were cut back again in 1917. The LNWR goods yard was below the passenger platforms and wagons were raised and lowered by hydraulic lifts, but the goods sidings were to the west of the passenger station.
Both the NLR and Broad Street proved to be a great success. The NLR’s traffic doubled and increased still further when from January 1875, trains ran through to Broad Street from Great Northern Railway suburban stations. At one time, Broad Street was amongst the busiest of the London termini, handling 712 trains daily with 80,000 passengers in 1906. An indication of the intensity of suburban working was that each pair of platforms shared a coaling stage.
Further massive disruption and demolition of housing was required for St Pancras when it was built for the Midland Railway’s extension to London after the original arrangement that saw trains running from Hitchin to King’s Cross starting in early 1858, had proved expensive. The heavy excursion traffic for the Great Exhibition of 1862 also showed the limitations on capacity at King’s Cross, even before the growth in the Great Northern Railway’s traffic in the years that followed. It was clear the MR needed its own terminus and its own approach route.
The MR already had its own goods yard in London at Agar Town, between the North London Railway and the Regent’s Canal. It was decided to extend this line to the Euston Road, at the boundary set by the Royal Commission on London’s Termini, which effectively barred further incursions by railways into the centre of London. A 4½ acre site was found for the terminus. Once again, the extension required the demolition of thousands of slum dwellings in Agar Town and Somers Town, with some 10,000 people evicted without compensation. Even the dead were not spared the upheaval of railway expansions as the line infringed the cemetery of St Pancras Church, with successive layers of corpses having to be removed and re-interred: unfortunately it took complaints in the press for this to be done with any sense of reverence. The disruption to the cemetery was largely due to a double track link being constructed to the Metropolitan Railway on the east side of the extension, with a tunnel inside which there was a gradient of 1 in 75. Despite these problems, the line to the terminus itself had to pass over the Regent’s Canal which meant both a falling gradient towards the terminus and a platform level some twenty feet above street level. Ironically, the widening of the Metropolitan (City Widened Lines) did not go further west than King’s Cross and so was of more use for GNR trains than those of the Midland until further widening in 1926, but the spur from the Midland main line was closed in 1935!
Initially, when William Barlow designed the station, he proposed filling the space under the tracks and platforms with soil excavated from the tunnels, but James Allport, the MR’s general manager, saw the potential for storage space, especially for beer from Burton-on-Trent. This led Barlow to design a single span trainshed, which not only allowed greater freedom in planning the storage space beneath the station, but also meant that the layout of the tracks and platforms could be altered as needed in the years to come. A large Gothic hotel was constructed in front of the station, giving it the most impressive frontage of any London terminus. While trains from Bedford to Moorgate started using the tunnel under the terminus from 13 July 1868, the terminus itself was opened to traffic on 1 October 1868, without any ceremony.
The Midland Grand Hotel was still at foundation level when the station opened, but this was intended to be the most luxurious of its kind, and a monument to its architect, Sir Gilbert Scott.
The approaches consisted of four tracks, although further out these became an up line and two down lines. After Cambridge Street Junction, the line became simple double track until St Paul’s Road Junction, where the lines from the Metropolitan surfaced. The main locomotive depot was at Kentish Town, 1½ miles from the terminus. Despite not being as busy as Waterloo, Victoria or Liverpool Street, the approaches were congested, almost from the beginning, and difficult to operate, especially when working empty stock to and from the station. Improvements in 1907-08 helped, but the problem was never resolved during the age of steam, although in later years diesel multiple unit working with trains turned around in the station helped considerably.
The station was meant to serve the MR’s long distance ambitions. The company saw its main market as the East Midlands, but while that was the basis of its traffic, its services to Scotland that started in the 1870s were also important. Despite having a local platform, there was almost no suburban traffic for many years with the MR’s suburban trains, never plentiful, working through to Moorgate. Even in 1903, there were just fourteen suburban arrivals between 5 am and 10 am. It was not until 1910 that the Midland Railway began to encourage suburban traffic at St Pancras. The MR needed running powers into the London Docks over the Great Eastern, and in return the GER was able to claim that St Pancras was its West End terminus, which required some stretch of the imagination, and ran trains from Norfolk and Suffolk into the station. The GER trains were eventually suspended in 1917 as a First World War economy measure, and with the exception of a daily train to Hunstanton during the summers of 1922 and 1923, never reinstated. Nevertheless, it was St Pancras that was used by the Royal Family when travelling to and from Sandringham.
From 1894, the London Tilbury & Southend Railway ran boat trains for passengers catching ships at Tilbury to Scandinavia and Australia. These services survived nationalisation and did not revert to Liverpool Street until 1963.
Finally, the largest terminus within the City of London, Liverpool Street, was built to replace the Shoreditch terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway. When the ECR was absorbed into the Great Eastern Railway in 1862, the question arose again of terminus in central London, coupled with the building of additional suburban lines and the conversion of Shoreditch to a goods station. A number of locations were considered, including Finsbury Circus, and for the track to continue from Bishopsgate on viaduct. Parliament approved the scheme in 1864, mainly because the line approached Liverpool Street in tunnel so that the demolition of London’s housing stock would be kept to the minimum, but also because it was beside Broad Street.
The plan was that the lines should leave the existing high level route at Tapp Street, just west of Bethnal Green, and fall to below street level, and then run in tunnel under Commercial Street and Shoreditch High Street before turning to enter the terminus, which would be built on what had been the gardens of the Bethlehem Hospital. Some demolition was inevitable, including the City of London Theatre and the City of London Gasworks, and 450 tenement dwellings housing around 7,000 people. The GER was bound under the terms of the Act to run a 2d daily return train between Edmonton and Liverpool Street, and another between the terminus and Walthamstow. Later claims by the GER to pay between 30 and 50 shillings as compensation to displaced tenants can be discounted as the payments at the time would have been much lower.
The terminus was built below street level, much to the consternation of many of the directors, but Samuel Swarbrick, the GER’s general manager, was concerned to cut costs, despite the fact that departing trains would be faced with a tunnel through which the track climbed steeply. The new station opened in stages, with the first being on 2 February 1874, handling just the suburban services to Enfield and Walthamstow, and the station was not fully open until 1 November 1875, when the old Bishopsgate terminus was handed over to be converted for goods traffic.
Liverpool Street occupied ten acres in the heart of the City and had ten platforms, numbered from west to east. Platforms 1 and 2 ran under the station building and the street to a junction with the Metropolitan Railway, to the west of its Liverpool Street underground station, known until 1909 as Bishopsgate. The street front of the new station consisted of three blocks, with the main one 90 feet high and running along Liverpool Street itself, and a second running from its western then running into one at its northern end set at right angles to it, 67 feet high. In the space left by the blocks were four roadways for pedestrians and vehicles. The roof was perhaps the best feature of the building, set high and with a delicate appearance, with four glazed spans. There was a clock tower on the outside of the building, on the roof of the north block: inside train shed, the roof later had two four-faced clocks suspended from it.
Behind the north block, was the suburban station with eight tracks and ten platform faces, while the mainline platforms were to the east of the middle block. Later, the suburban platforms were numbered 1 to 8, with platform 9 used by both suburban and long distance services.
Costs for building a terminus in the heart of the City of London were high, and while compensation for the displaced tenants was poor, the landowners received far higher compensation, so that the cost of Liverpool Street eventually mounted to £2 million (£120 million by today’s prices), and to allow for this, an Act of 1869 allowed the GER to charge the two-mile fare for the 1¼ mile extension. This was, incidentally, unusual in the British Isles, but a common practice in Europe to charge extra for a railway line involving heavy engineering works.
The opening of Liverpool Street encouraged the GER to build a set of three suburban branch lines north of Bethnal Green, serving Hackney Downs and Tottenham, Edmonton, with a junction with the original Enfield branch, and from Hackney Downs through Clapton to a junction with the Cambridge line and the still new branch to Walthamstow. The latter was extended to Chingford in 1873, and the line to Tottenham and Edmonton was extended to Palace Gates at Wood Green in 1878. Some of these lines were open before Liverpool Street was ready, so a new station, Bishopsgate Low Level, was opened on the new extension to Liverpool Street in November 1872. The low level station was under the existing terminus, and with no room for smoke and steam to escape, the tank engines used were equipped with condensing apparatus, which was also seen as necessary for the projected through running onto the MR. It was eventually closed as a wartime economy measure in 1916.
Added to the GER’s own branches were services running from the East London Railway, completed in April 1876. In July of that year, the London Brighton & South Coast Railway introduced a service from East Croydon, while the South Eastern Railway, later South Eastern & Chatham, started a service from Addiscombe in April 1880, which lasted until March 1884. At the beginning of 1886, the GER took over the LBSCR services, although from 1911 they terminated at New Cross and were withdrawn when the ELR was electrified in 1913.
These suburban developments and the continued growth on the earlier lines and a growing business to and from the holiday resorts and market towns of East Anglia, meant that by 1884 it was realised that the traffic at Liverpool Street itself would soon outgrow the station. Fortunately, the GER had been steadily acquiring land to the east of the station, and had eventually land up to Bishopsgate 188-ft wide and six acres in extent. Clearance began and on 1890 work began on what was to become the East Side Station. A sign of social change was that Parliament insisted that alternative accommodation be found for the tenants in the properties cleared away, and indeed that they be rehoused at low rents. Accommodation could only be found for 137 tenants in existing property, so another 600 were housed in tenements built by the GER.
It was not enough simply to expand the station: the approach lines had to be expanded as well to avoid congestion. A third pair of approach tracks was built between Bethnal Green and Liverpool Street, enabling the westernmost set of tracks to be reserved entirely for the Enfield and Walthamstow services, so from 1891, these were known as the suburban lines, the middle set became the local lines and the easternmost, the through lines. The four tracks continued as far as Romford.
The new Liverpool Street was the largest London terminus until the rebuilt Victoria re-opened in 1908. By the number of passengers handled daily, it remained the busiest terminus even after 1908. In a typical day, it handled 851 passenger arrivals and departures, as well as 224 empty carriage trains, ten goods trains and five light engine movements.
The new East Side frontage was taken by the Great Eastern Hotel, completed in May 1884, and the largest hotel in the City. Beneath the hotel, an area known as the ‘backs’ included an extension of the tracks from platforms 9 and 10. This was used by a nightly goods train that brought in coal for the hotel and the engine docks, as well as small consignments for the offices and the hotel, while taking away the hotel’s refuse and ashes from the engine docks. The eastward extension also meant that these two platforms split the station in two, and so a footbridge was built right across the station, although on two levels and too narrow to accommodate the numbers needing to use it at peak times.
Meanwhile, other suburban branch lines had been added to the GER network, although the first of these, the line to Southend, completed in 1889, would not have been regarded as even outer suburban at the time! It was joined by a line from Edmonton to Cheshunt, known as the Churchbury Loop, in 1891, and between Ilford and Woodford, known as the Hainault Loop, in 1903. The former closed in 1909 due to disappointing traffic, and that to Hainault was not much more successful, so it must have been a relief when an eastwards extension of the Central Line took it over some years later.
The last terminus to be built in London, the Great Central Railway’s station at Marylebone, had an especially difficult time as the company’s extension to London ran through St John’s Wood, the residents of which objected, and past Lords, the cricket ground, having burrowed under Hampstead. Despite its late arrival, Marylebone has always resembled a small provincial terminus. The Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, had been a cross-county operation whose main line ran from Grimsby to Manchester, and without a London route of its own, it lost this growing traffic to first the Great Northern Railway and, later, the Midland Railway. Opposition to Parliamentary approval was strong, especially from the cricketing fraternity as the line would run close to Lords. There was also opposition from the artists of St John’s Wood. Eventually, the extension from near Nottingham to London was authorised in 1893.
The MSLR was not allowed to use the Metropolitan lines, but was able to use the same alignment: the Metropolitan was already very busy with its own suburban traffic. Fresh powers had to be obtained so that new lines could be laid. It was also considered expedient to change the company’s somewhat provincial title to the more impressive Great Central Railway, and this was done on 1 August 1897.
Marylebone needed more than fifty acres, including coal and goods depots, and 4,448 persons were evicted during the slum clearance that followed, with many moved to homes nearby, but as a sign of changing times and more enlightened attitudes, more than half, 2,690, were moved to six five-storey locks of flats, built by the company and known as Wharncliffe Gardens after the new chairman of the GCR. This disruption was despite much of the approach being in tunnel or cut and covered construction passing under the streets of St John’s Wood. The gradient was kept to 1 in 100. To allow for possible future quadrupling, not one but two tunnels were excavated under Hampstead.
Approaching the terminus, the seven tracks expanded to fourteen as the line passed over the Regent’s Canal, which included a second span for the proposed and authorised, but never built, Regent’s Canal, City & Docks Railway. Coal and goods depots were built on both sides of Lisson Grove.
The feeble resources of the GCR were stretched almost to breaking point by its expansion southwards. In its best year, 1864, its predecessor, the MSLR had achieved a dividend of just 3.5 per cent. An architect for the station was beyond the company’s resources, while the terminus was a modest affair, albeit conveniently at street level, and the Great Central Hotel was left to others to develop. A three storey office block was provided, with provision for additional floors when required, but most of the accommodation remained unused until the GCR moved its headquarters from Manchester in 1905. The concourse, intended for a terminus twice the size with five double-faced platforms, stretched beyond the nine tracks and four built at its eastern end. Even the Great Central Hotel, with its 700 bedrooms, was over-ambitious, and in 1916 it was requisitioned by the government as a convalescent home for wounded officers. In the end, after being purchased as offices by the London & North Eastern Railway after the Second World War, it became 222 Marylebone Road, headquarters of the British Transport Commission, and when that was dissolved, the British Railways Board.
On 9 March 1899, a ceremonial opening was performed by the President of the Board of Trade. Public traffic started on 15 March. For the first month, only two platforms were used. By summer, there were eleven trains daily each way, of which seven were Manchester expresses. Where the GCR did score was in the comfort of its new carriages, all of which were corridor stock with electric lighting.
The problem was that the GCR route to Manchester was longer than that of the LNWR, and that to Sheffield longer than that of the Great Northern. The GCR was best for Leicester and Nottingham, neither of which matched the other cities for traffic. Even so, the Marylebone to Manchester journey time was down to 3 hrs 50 min by 1904, and Sheffield was three hours.
Much of these improved timings were due to a new general manager, Sam (later Sir Sam) Fay, who understood the need for good publicity and high standards of service. Timings were reduced, through services introduced to Bradford and Huddersfield, and to Stratford-upon-Avon using the Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway. Buses were laid on to carry arriving passengers to the West End, for which Marylebone was well placed, and to the City, for which it was not.
Before Fay joined the GCR, the Metropolitan Railway had completed quadrupling its lines as far as Harrow, and later, in 1906, its lines to Chesham, Brill and Verney Junction were leased to a new joint operating company of the GCR and MR, with the companies taking turns every five years to manage and staff the line. The agreement was that the GCR should not take local traffic between Marylebone and Harrow, but it was allowed to develop suburban traffic on the joint lines. The GCR soon took advantage of this, introducing local trains to Chesham and Aylesbury from March 1906. A year later, the opening of the Bakerloo tube line meant that Marylebone had good quick connections throughout the West End and to Waterloo and Charing Cross.
Despite the new found alliance between the GCR and the MR, the former still wanted a new route of its own. The MR line was more steeply graded than the GCR wanted for its planned express network, and also the curves were too severe for high speed running, especially at Aylesbury, which had a severe reverse curve. The answer lay in using the Great Western’s new line from Paddington to Birmingham, with a connecting line from near Quinton Road to Ashendon, and then from Neasden to Northolt. The shared section of the main line was managed jointly by a committee of the GCR and GWR. In return for its generosity, the GWR had the GCR abandon its own plans for a route to Birmingham.
The railways undoubtedly contributed much to the further growth and prosperity of London, and without them, the capital would not have been able to expand to its present extent, and by the end of the nineteenth century London was pulling in workers from as far afield as the Sussex Coast.